| | |
Summary: GLocks: Efficient Support for Highly-Contended Locks in Many-Core CMPs
JosŽe L. AbellŽan, Juan FernŽandez and Manuel E. Acacio
Dept. de IngenierŽia y TecnologŽia de Computadores, Universidad de Murcia
Facultad de InformŽatica, Campus de Espinardo s/n, 30100 Murcia, Spain
email: {jl.abellan, juanf, meacacio}@ditec.um.es
Abstract--Synchronization is of paramount importance to
exploit thread-level parallelism on many-core CMPs. In these
architectures, synchronization mechanisms usually rely on
shared variables to coordinate multithreaded access to shared
data structures thus avoiding data dependency conflicts. Lock
synchronization is known to be a key limitation to performance
and scalability. On the one hand, lock acquisition through busy
waiting on shared variables generates additional coherence
activity which interferes with applications. On the other hand,
lock contention causes serialization which results in perfor-
mance degradation. This paper proposes and evaluates GLocks,
a hardware-supported implementation for highly-contended
locks in the context of many-core CMPs. GLocks use a token-
based message-passing protocol over a dedicated network built
on state-of-the-art technology. This approach skips the memory
|
